Torna
Live
by
the
Sword . . .
An Adventure Novel of Swords and Space and Such by B W Canfield
The Book
Torna is a 'what if', speculative narrative. I have often been amazed at the incongruity of major events, their consequences, and the news stories about said events that make no sense when under scrutiny. For instance, the wonderful news, right after high school, that the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident was only a minor blip, and everything is wonderful, because nuclear power in the United States is wonderfully controlled and safe; it can't happen here, only other countries have problems like that.
Twenty five years later, after taking most of the nuclear power plants off-line, especially Three Mile Island because the 'little blip' had nearly burned through the containment structure and rendered the plant inoperable, we find out that most of the plants had had major accidents, and only sheer luck had kept us from having a Chernobyl type incident, and thank God that we were smart enough to shut down our nuclear plants.
So, what if the gov'ts and big businesses of the world had put the effort into space exploration to really go somewhere, in a co-operative effort, like the effort put into putting a man on the moon. Instead of wasting 1,000,000,000,000s of dollars, if they had followed up the Apollo and Soyuz programs with the same efforts, and the technology advanced like we see computer and other technology advancing. The results would have been phenomenal; just look at the difference in cell phones today, and a rotary dial phone, or a cell phone and Brainiac.
What if society didn't have nationalistic or financial competition influencing every major decision? What if people didn't have to see the Pope calling every media station in Europe to come see him do a little act of kindness that you or I do every day without thinking about it. What if barn-raisings, long healthy life, and home ownership were everyday things, and we had time to pursue the arts, or adventure, or whatever?
That's what Torna is about; that, and what it is worth to save it.
